San Francisco didn’t get weird; it’s always been weird. That’s a core lesson of this week’s terrific time-machine program at Davies Symphony Hall, where Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony are bringing back to life the very fabric of old San Francisco, through music.

The program has an unwieldy title: “Barbary Coast and Beyond: Music from the Gold Rush to the Panama-Pacific Exhibition.” Conducted and hosted by Tilson Thomas, vibrantly narrated by Val Diamond (of “Beach Blanket Babylon” fame) and featuring a series of dazzlingly virtuoso star turns, it debuted Thursday, repeats through Saturday and ought to become the template for a series of such “history in the spotlight” shows. Or at least it should become a CD or DVD.

Thursday’s performance — a high-class revue — kept one-upping itself; by the time soprano Laura Claycomb improvised her hilarious descant accompaniment to the sing-along tune “San Francisco,” a vintage Hollywood anthem about the Golden Gate, I expected Bugs Bunny to go streaking across the stage. And I’d like to know the budget for Claycomb’s gowns; she wore several, including a sleeveless scarlet job, its satin ruffles cascading to the floor in heaps as this marvelous singer executed creamy-toned vocal pirouettes.

At that moment, Claycomb — star of the show, if one must be selected — was responding to the tale of Lola Montez, an exotic Gypsy dancer and “Carmen”-esque superstar of Gold Rush-era San Francisco. A lover of Franz Liszt and Ludwig I of Bavaria, she was born Betty Gilbert in Ireland — just one of the strange-but-true characters who populated San Francisco’s early cultural happenings, many of which centered in the dodgy “Barbary Coast” neighborhood. It sat at the intersection of what are now Chinatown, North Beach, Jackson Square and the Financial District.

Later in the show, Claycomb sang Bellini’s “Ah! non credea … Ah, non giunge,” from “La sonnambula.” Reincarnating the soprano Adelina Patti — who arrived in San Francisco in 1884 on a private train, replete with solid silver bathtub — Claycomb floated her dizzying coloratura parts with silver-stranded delicacy and wrenching emotion. Tilson Thomas conducted the orchestra with extravagant restraint, making you wonder why he doesn’t just walk across the street to War Memorial Opera House one of these days to conduct some Italian opera.

And so it went: one story after the next about the banjoists (the show began with three of them on stage), dancers, singers and traveling virtuosi who left their marks on San Francisco in the decades following the 1849 gold strike, when the city became a cultural center, with theaters going up (and burning down) with the rapidity of a child playing with an Erector Set. San Francisco “always was crazy for music,” explained Tilson Thomas, noting that Mayor Eugene Schmitz, who guided the city through the 1906 earthquake disaster, was a violinist and head of the local musicians union. The mayor also owned disreputable dance halls and opium dens, and yet, the conductor deadpanned, “his greatest love was chamber music.”

“Barbary Coast” could have used more ambiance: saw dust in the aisles, gaslights on stage. It made do with large overhead projections: scores of illustrations and photos of the various personalities, the theaters and life on the city streets during this period of change. One image melted into the next, Ken Burns-style, on a screen hanging over the orchestra and soloists. In the end, it was enough, because the program — curated by Tilson Thomas to honor the orchestra’s centennial — was so smart and entertaining, better than an opening night gala.

I can’t quit without telling you that violinist Vadim Gluzman (responding to tales of fiddlers Ole Bull, Fritz Kreisler and Henryk Wieniawski) performed with the sort of infallibly sturdy and expressive fiddling that’s not often heard — and that brings David Oistrakh to mind. Or that pipe organist Cameron Carpenter elaborated John Philip Sousa’s “The Stars and Stripes Forever” into a crazy Gothic dazzler. Or that musical saw virtuoso Caroline McCaskey practically stole the show by playing Offenbach with the soaring lyric perfection of a great diva.

The crackerjack U.S. Air Force Band of the Golden West joined in for Camille Saint-Saëns’ “Hail! California,” which melds the “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “La Marseillaise.” And then there was the San Francisco Symphony, alone, reaching back to its very first program, on Dec. 8, 1911, to play the “Allegro molto vivace” from Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” Symphony. Led by curator Tilson Thomas, the performance came across with expansive feeling and a sweet spring in its step.

Richard Scheinin covers residential real estate for the Bay Area News Group. He has written for GQ and Rolling Stone and is the author of Field of Screams: The Dark Underside of America’s National Pastime (W.W. Norton), a history of baseball. During his 25-plus years based at The Mercury News, his work has been submitted for Pulitzer Prizes for reporting on religion, classical music and jazz. He shared in the Pulitzer Prize awarded to the Mercury News staff for coverage of the Loma Prieta earthquake. He has profiled hundreds of public figures, from Ike Turner to Tony La Russa.

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